by CKR
The Bush administration doesn't believe in arms control. It won't negotiate a fissile material cutoff treaty because it might be hard to verify. It won't take the simple step of agreeing with Russia to an extension of the START I Treaty, now being used to verify Moscow Treaty reductions (no verification provisions in the Moscow Treaty) and set to expire in 2009. It withdrew from the Antiballistic Missile Treaty.
But Congress appears to think that arms control is a good idea, that more and more missiles and bombs do not make the world safer. A few weeks ago, they voted to withhold funding for the new-design Reliable Replacement (nuclear) Warhead until the administration came up with a policy on the use of nuclear weapons for the post-Cold-War world we've been in for almost twenty years now. That got the attention of the Secretaries of Energy, Defense and State, who prepared a statement to say they're working on a report.
The statement and the promise of a "report" sound like it's may not be much more than what we've seen before, no rethinking. But Congress got their attention. And if it judges that the report isn't much, Congress can continue to withhold money.
Now, according to a report from The Guardian, Congress is using its power of the purse to slow down the deployment of an American antiballistic system in the Czech Republic and Poland. However, it looks like Boeing has already been awarded a contract. That story was covered in Poland, Russia and India, but not so much in the US, although the Associated Press did get something out on it.
Congress's power of the purse is a blunt instrument, but as we see in the case of the RRW, it can begin to move even this administration.
But I'm wondering why we're not hearing about this in American newspapers. Or about Vice President Cheney's trip to India to hand them a privileged nuclear status, above that of the NPT nuclear weapon states.
Update (later in the afternoon): Mission accomplished for Vice President Cheney. Note that Robert Einhorn agrees with me. The question is why the administration is doing this. Congress still has to approve this deal, but the pressures will be immense, most likely greater than their newfound allegiance to arms control.
Further Update (7/28/07): Here's the Washington Post article. Note that Daryl Kimball, executive director of the Arms Control Association, says something very similar to what Einhorn and I have said.
The issue on India's reprocessing of fuel supplied by the US is that this makes that fuel essentially an enriched uranium and plutonium supply to India. Even if India uses that uranium and plutonium only for more reactor fuel and not weapons, it increases its supply so that India can use more of its own uranium and plutonium for weapons. Generally fuel-supply agreements between any countries involve shipment of spent fuel back to the supplier country. This is quite an exception.